Titanic

Titanic (1997) is still argued about nearly thirty years later, and most of the argument comes from misreading what it is. Cameron did not build a disaster film. It splits cleanly: roughly a hundred minutes of a class story, then ninety minutes of a sinking. Every detail planted in the first half returns in the second. The third class passengers held behind gates is not invention, it is what happened. It runs 194 minutes and you feel it. In exchange, the sinking plays out close to real time, and there is very little in cinema like it. The set was built at nearly full scale and lowered into water under control. Digital effects existed by then, but Cameron shot most of it physically, which is why the film has not aged the way its contemporaries have. The door argument: Cameron eventually commissioned an actual scientific test and published the result. Worth looking up afterwards for its own entertainment. Good for: epic romance, large scale filmmaking, and watching with family. Less good for: the drowning sequences are genuinely distressing and there is a nude scene. Anyone treating it as history should remember the love story is invented.